Run a successful Data Governance Program

Dataflux is sponsoring a free Webcast today titled “ZERO TO FIVE: A Stepwise Progression for MDM and Data Governance”. Jill Dyché and Evan Levy will discuss:

• Why MDM needs to be deconstructed into discrete functional areas

• Why understanding business requirements means understanding functional requirements

• Why successful MDM depends on a solid data governance framework

The webcast is Today at 2PM EST. To register, click here.

This is an un-sponsored post.

Update:  Thanks to Dave for commenting.  This is actually for Business Performance Management, not Process. 

If you’re involved in Business Process Management (BPM), you may be interested in the Zoomerang survey available here. All participants receive a complimentary $5 gift card from Starbucks and five participants will win an iPod touch.

This post isn’t sponsored - but I know many of us are involved in BPM so it is a decent opportunity.

If you’re not sure what BPM is, here’s a little bit from wikipedia:

Business Process Management (BPM) is a field of knowledge at the intersection between management and information technology, encompassing methods, techniques and tools to design, enact, control, and analyze operational business processes involving humans, organizations, applications, documents and other sources of information.

Whether your are new to the discipline of Data Quality or an old pro, you’ll likely have heard, over-and-over, that poor data quality leads to an overall poor value of the data and ultimately poor decision making. This is certainly a good point and I have no argument with it. I would like to point out, however, that there have been times when poor data quality, mistakes, and little quality assurance has led to quite valuable products. Submitted solely for your entertainment, here are some examples of the high value of poor quality.
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When starting a new initiative as large as Data Governance, it often helps to show its benefits. The problem with this is that when you are first starting, the benefits you are touting are merely theoretical to those you are trying to sell because nothing has actually happened yet. When my data governance program was started we never mentioned the buzz word ‘data governance’… we actually didn’t really use buzz words or try to categorize it. For us, the key was to just start a project that was fixing a major business problem. The process we developed for solving these problems became the Data Governance program.
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Check out the article “The Death of Dirty Data” published in The Canadian Underwriter (of all places).

It is really well written and focuses on data quality, data governance, and data management.

“Data is the foundation of practically everything that goes on in today’s organizations, and so managing the quality of data is reaching “business-critical” status.”

New Design

You’ve probably noticed by now that we switched up the site design earlier this week. We’ve gone with a cleaner look so that the focus is clearly on the content. We’ve also added some space in the sidebar to your right for advertisers. The vision for The Data Governance Blog is to grow into a valuable resource for data management professionals. That means our content will encompass learning about best practices, past experiences, industry events, vendors, and products.

Your Participation

“Build your resume by being a Guest Contributor”

As part of our vision, we’re reaching out to you to help us grow. Would you like to be a guest contributor? Your writeups don’t have to be long or involved like traditional journals and magazines. We’re all about quick hitting information here. If you have a good tip or a past experience (good or bad) that you learned from, please contribute! Or, if you read an article recently and you have some comments on it, please share! All you have to do to contribute is shoot me an email.

Recent Data Management News

Developing a Successful Master Data Management RFP–Steps to Avoid
And includes a very helpful list of “Ten Costly RFP Mistakes to Avoid ”

Co-Operators, BMO, bank on Big Blue software
This covers IBM’s new product and some of the business needs for Customer Data Inegration (CDI).

A very interesting article was written over at the Data Strategy Journal recently - in it they attempted to simply define Data Governance. Easy task right? Not so much. Their method for getting at some definitions was to interview consultants, practitioners, and vendors and asking them to simply “define data governance”. I like the approach of asking people in different positions to define something - this almost certainly ensures diversity since their perspectives are very different. Its a bit frightening to see the many different types of answers, but I certainly understand them since the discipline is still emerging.
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There really is something to be said about dividing up your council to work on separate issues and then reconvening to discuss and approve the results. I’ve used this technique recently for some of the issues on our tracking sheet that ‘just won’t go away’. You probably have these too… whether they be important but nagging issues with the legacy systems or a business unit who just won’t respond so you can close something out. In any case, over time, these outstanding issues will multiply and the best method I’ve found it so assign them out to your stewards to have them worked on. I’ve also found that there are a few keys to success when doing this.
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The last session that I wanted to write about was titled, “A Business Value-Driven Approach to Data Quality” and was presented by Richard Trapp from Avaya. For those of you don’t know of Avaya (I suspect most of you do, as you probably have one of their phones sitting right next to you), they were spun off from Lucent and are now a leading business communications technology provider. Richard started the DQ program at Avaya and went about doing it in a very unique way — every effort he makes is focused on the trackable dollar value it brings back to the business.
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